This study aims to assess the economic efficiency of Tunisian olive oil firms in order to identify the organizational and technological variables that are directly associated with greater efficiency. The Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and fuzzy sets Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) method were used to achieve this. We find the managing director’s education level and information and communication technologies (ICT) training, the longevity of the company in inverse relationship with efficiency, the company’s presence on and use of virtual social networks, and the outsourcing of ICT management in combination have significant explanatory power in the companies that display greater economic efficiency.

Journal of the Operational Research Society (JORS) is the world's longest established OR journal and an official journal of The OR Society. It is the aim of the Journal to present papers which are relevant to practitioners, researchers, teachers, students and consumers of operational research, and which cover the theory, practice, history or methodology of OR.

Sustainability and multifunctionality of agriculture have become widely shared goals for both scientific community and decision makers. Nowadays, it is important to assess not only the economic sustainability of farms, but also their environmental and socio-territorial sustainability. Numerous sustainability measurement tools have been developed by researchers and some institutions to assess these three dimensions. With the purpose to improve farms’ sustainability, this paper aims providing oriented strategies to go toward more conscientious farmers’ practices in the Tunisian organic olive sector. To reach this goal, two methodological steps were followed: (i) a sustainability measurement process to quantify farms’ sustainability by a methodological adaptation of the IDEA approach; (ii) on the basis of the obtained scores of the three sustainability scales, farms’ segmentation was carried out by the use of cluster analysis. In that sense, a questionnaire directed to a sample of organic olive growing farmers was carried out in the regions of Sfax and Mahdia, Tunisia. Results show a variability of sustainability levels within and between groups of farms. Cluster analysis results confirmed the existence of two main farms’ groups. The first group is more agro-environmentally and socio-territorially sustainable than the second one. Weaknesses in the sustainability performances have been identified and improvement strategies have been formulated and oriented to each group. Results also indicate that in some cases there is no antagonism between environmental, socio-territorial and economic sustainability, so it is possible to improve simultaneously the three dimensions of sustainability.

To achieve food security goals, water accounting seems to be one of the most powerful tools to deal with water scarcity management. Thus, indicators, such as virtual water and water productivity, can be considered complementary rather than competing indicators to assess water demand efficiency use. Water computation is, therefore, a crucial tool to understand the overall tendency of water consumption and to assist the decision makers in their decisional process about water efficiency use in different phases of production. In this perspective, this paper aims to evaluate water use throughout the value chain of the olive oil sector, which is the first strategic agro-industrial sector in Tunisia. This evaluation will be undertaken while taking into account various crucial issues concerning the main two production phases in terms of the importance of water consumption (agriculture and processing phase). In the agriculture phase, the rainfed and irrigated modes will be compared, and in the processing phase, three different processing systems will be evaluated. Thirty surveys with farmers and nine surveys with olive oil mill owners were undertaken in the arid region of Sfax: one of the most important olive oil producers in Tunisia. The results show the importance of the theoretical framework adopted in clarifying the state of water consumption in a strategic sector, such as the Tunisian olive oil sector. In addition, the different calculated indicators highlight the importance of the application of a whole technical package and a controlled and efficient use of water to improve the economic profitability and the necessity to revise the irrigated olive growing extensions’ policies under arid conditions. In addition, in the processing phase, the continuous-two phase system is emphasized as the most relevant system in terms of water efficiency use. This system is proposed to be encouraged by policy makers in future olive mill installations.